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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Demons some thoughts pt 1

Ahhh the Nova is about a week away and we are still in a “Go” status. I still plan on taking my demons but I admit that tweaks had to be made to change the list around. The meta has changed since the Dark Eldar and Grey Knights hit the board so certain units have lost a step for various reasons while other units have more to offer now in my opinion. Of course this is depending on your play style just like with any list you run however I would find it hard to believe that another demon player feels differently about it.

I have also made several changes to my list with reliability in mind. Reliability, duality, and redundancy are your bread and butter when building an army. However some armies have limited options and you have to except that as part of playing certain armies. Demons are Random so you need to deal with that. In fact that is a large bit of why they aren’t considered overly competitive. I can’t say I disagree with that. (clearly they have some other issues, however this is a large problem) So let’s talk tactics a moment and general concepts. I don’t usually talk demon tactics on a regular basis something that was pointed out to me the other day. I run a blog and never really talk about tactics using my primary army. =P

First off in general Demons have some issues that need to be considered.

Let’s start with the obvious Splitting your wave. First off you don’t technically have to choose your wave until the start of turn one. So you can decided depending on what is going on what you want to do. Taking your opponents deployment, army type, and terrain into mind when choosing your primary vs secondary wave which sounds good. However the reality is you really have two options most the time. You can stack your waves into two sides each with its own plan once it comes down, choose the one that better suits the current match up. If you don’t get what you want you then deal with trying to work with what you have. The other option is to evenly split your wave as much as possible which is very hard in a demon army because of what the units do. Evenly splitting pretty much means your army isn’t going to pack as much punch since you aren’t stacking your most useful units on one side. It’s a bit harder to play that way.

Taking this into mind I had been playing with option one initially. I had several shooting elements in my secondary wave and if I got that wave I would stand off and make you move forward while my reserves came in. Wasn’t bad but sometimes it would really be an uphill battle when I rolled that one or two. It really sucked sometimes to basically lose a game because you rolled a two during turn one. So I have been playing and testing a balanced wave approach which isn’t ideal.. however the goal is to take the roll out of the equation as much as possible making the army more reliable. It took some getting used to and a bit of a shift in strategy but I think I like it better now and it’s the way to go. Some things to note are even splitting doesn’t always mean the exact same unit in each wave, it means having the same tools in each wave as much as possible.

Now the next problem is I have to Deep Strike in. This is a blessing and a curse I think. So you have to adjust your play style to this and design your army around it. Which brings us to Icons, Initially most demon players run with no icons at all you need to learn to do without them. I think at first this is very true it teaches you to judge and deal with the fact you need to Deep Strike everything and free’s up some much needed points. (You need to squeeze all you can out of those points!!! ) I initially have been playing with one Icon on my Crushers for wound allocation reasons more than as an DS icon. It was nice to have the extra option should I want to use it, though that wasn’t its purpose. Again after playing tons of games I am now in the camp that a second Icon in your other wave is really nice to have. Your units have to come in Via DS so being able to remove a possibly dangerous dice roll from even needing to be taken can be great depending on the game. There are times that you should DS and not use the icon but again you now have another option at your disposal that gives you the ability to make something in your list more reliable.

2 comments:

The Icon in both waves also super helps with lists that include Fateweaver. Fatey is starting to look much better now that the torrent armies (GK and Deldar) are around. Being able to ensure things get near him or even better, to maybe have him DS in out of LoS (like behind a building or something), is stupid useful. It also helps out TONS when you want to include slower but tougher units, like Crushers, which are more resilient to those torrent armies.

If your running a Fatey list I completely agree with the need for a icon or two. This again adds another level of reliability to the army as I said and allows you to further get your points out of his ability which is vastly important given his points cost. I have some thoughts on Fatey but I won't get ahead of myself lol. =P

About Me

You may know Drkmorals from such sites as MWC, FTW, STC, and now 40k Global. His personal site is Emperor's Codex. All these places he randomly spills 40k nonsense and tries to impact the community in a positive manner.